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Tag Archives: second life regions

I found this is a interesting subject to talk, because recently some blogs are speaking about that “Opensim regions top Second life private sims”, i don’t want to discuss about but just to present some reasons and facts. But, how is this possible ?, here is a easy answer: “Free or Cheap Opensim sims” and another thing is that there are more and more opensim grids providers (and they are still growing) than just one grid provider like Second Life, so that is another of the reasons why they are more opensim regions than second life regions. We aren’t speaking about one opensim service provider, here’s a list I have taken from Opensimulator website:

And may be there will be more Opensim Regions, if there will be more Opensim Grids providers. This is something that will not going stop into the future, Opensimulator is a opensource software and anyone can use it to build a grid server even on your own computer (later I will speak how you can do this). Sometimes when I see this list of the Opensim Grids, its remember to me something very similar with an Opensource Operating System, I am speaking about Linux. There are so many Linux distributions as there are so many Opensim grids on the internet. So how this is possible?, it is a easy answer, because the license of Opensimulator allow to do it:

“OpenSimulator is an open source multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. OpenSimulator allows virtual world developers to customize their worlds using the technologies they feel work best – we’ve designed the framework to be easily extensible. OpenSimulator is written in C#, running both on Windows over the .NET Framework and on Unix-like machines over the Mono framework. The source code is released under a BSD License, a commercially friendly license to embed OpenSimulator in products.”

For those who doesn’t knows what it is a “BSD License”, here is an information about (wikipedia):

“BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system after which it is named.The original owners of BSD were the Regents of the University of California because BSD was first written at the University of California, Berkeley. The first version of the license was revised, and the resulting licenses are more properly called modified BSD licenses.

Being a permissive free software license, the license places minimal restrictions on how the software can be redistributed. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have reciprocity / share-alike requirements.”

The prices are other facts (like the current economic situation in the world) that have taken people to change from a second life sim to a opensim sim, even me I can’t pay for a second life sim which cost around $295 a month and even more than that. With this bargain (free and cheaper opensim sims) it make possible that someone can have a region or a sim.

BUT there is something we need to review, we are comparing all the opensim grids with one grid provider (second life). If you just compare one opensim grid with second life grid, then you will see that it will have less regions. I want to explain this with an example:

“In one big country, there’s a big fastfood company with their own private license hamburger recipe, but in this country there are thousand of small fastfood companies sharing a “free license” hamburger recipe. The big fastfood company has something like two hundred restaurants. While the small fastfood companies have each other a few restaurants.

If you count all restaurants of the all small fastfood companies, offcourse they could be a lot than the big fastfood company. But what happened if you take one of this small fastfood companies and you compare with the big one ?, you will see that always the big company would have more restaurants than any small company in the country.”

So this is how I see it:

Osgrid has 11,919 regions and Second Life has 23356 regions.

I think that you cannot compare all the regions of the opensim grids with the regions of second life grid. You can compare one on one, but not one hundred against one (that’s what I think about). Can you compare all the small stores who sells a “free license ” orange juice formula with a big store with their own”private license” orange juice formula ?.